Every year there is a lot of hoopla about a new crop of fiction writers and their dazzling debuts. Who could fail to notice—or, years later, forget—the fanfare that greeted the publication of first books by Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, ZZ Packer, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith? The six-figure advances, the national coverage, the interviews, and the nationwide tours—all to alert readers of the coming of the “next new thing” in contemporary fiction. Indeed, Poets & Writers Magazine has published an annual feature on debut fiction for the past five years, drawing attention to first-timers such as Hannah Tinti, Adam Haslett, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

It’s all very exciting. But what about the debut poets?

Media attention to first books by poets is slight at best. The fact that the books are published, everyone agrees, is a great thing. But, minus the hype that accompanies their fiction-writing counterparts, they must somehow find their way into the hands of a relatively small group of readers. While fiction writers reap accolades in the months before and after the publication of their first books, debut poets, it seems, must wait considerably longer—if they get any attention at all. Many years after they were published, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923), Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (1926), and John Ashbery’s Some Trees (1956) are regarded as great first books of poetry. Time will tell which of the hundreds of collections published this year will be the first titles in the long bibliographies of the next great American poets.

The eighteen poets featured here represent only a fraction of the debut books published in 2005, yet they are emblematic of the diverse community of poets who have recently forged their own paths to publication. (Every April, the nonprofit poetry library Poets House opens its doors to showcase new poetry books that have been published in the past year or so. This year, the organization displayed 2,100 books, and, according to Jane Preston, managing director of Poets House, approximately 20 to 30 percent of these—over six hundred—were debut titles.) Also represented here are the publishers—small presses, like Edge Books and Slope Editions; university presses, like Texas Tech University Press; and commercial publishers, like Penguin and W.W. Norton—that support debut titles.

Most of these poets—fourteen of them—earned MFAs in creative writing before publishing their books, which is illustrative of the proliferation of such programs. (There are now over three hundred in North America, according to David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.) Andrea Baker, the author of Like Wind Loves a Window (Slope Editions), is one of those who didn’t. “I think there have been some good things about not doing an MFA, just in terms of not having…so much noise in my head,” she says. “But I’ve also relied heavily on friends with MFAs to provide feedback on my own work and to introduce me to the work of poets who have ended up being monumentally influential.”

The peer groups that MFA programs offer are named as one of the greatest benefits cited by the poets who attended graduate school. Christian Barter (The Singers I Prefer, CavanKerry Press) says the program at Vermont College was life-altering, because it provided access to people who shared his interests. “Those of us who believe in poems—who really believe in them, who believe they are things worth giving our lives to—are a strange breed, and at times we need each other.” Geri Doran (Resin, Louisiana State University Press), who received her MFA from the University of Florida, agrees. “I was engaged, for the time, in a sustained conversation about writing, and I was among poets who cared deeply about craft,” she says. “I found it intoxicating.”

Some poets, however, find academic programs claustrophobic and have a difficult time relating to their peers on any topic except poetry. While Thomas Sayers Ellis, the author of The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press), appreciated having the time to write and the financial assistance that the program at Brown University offered him, his experience was mixed. “I’ve never met a happy graduate student, and I’ve never met a happy black graduate creative writer in a white program,” says Ellis, who is African American. “Let’s just say that the graduate MFA workshop ritual is a secret handshake…at best.” Matthew Shenoda (Somewhere Else, Coffee House Press) had an especially negative experience at the University of Arizona. “It was an atmosphere of false competition, little community, and a real aversion to certain styles of writing, points of view, and recognition of the varied global traditions in poetry,” he says. “I was one of very few students of color in my MFA program, and it felt like a conformist atmosphere, where the content of one’s work was not to reflect real-world issues, especially in regard to race and culture.”

The opinions about MFA programs might be best summed up by Leslie Bumstead (Cipher/Civilian, Edge Books), who received her degree from George Mason University. “I think graduate school can be beneficial but isn’t necessarily so,” she says. “It can drive you crazy with the politics and the competition, but that’s true of anything.”

While debut poets don’t share the same views on higher education, they all know the necessity to earn a living apart from their work as poets. As Robert Graves said, “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” So, in addition to being poets, they are waiters, editors, teachers, small business owners, and freelance writers—and all of them face the challenge of finding time to write while holding a job.

K.E. Duffin, the author of King Vulture (University of Arkansas Press), works part-time as an editor and writing tutor in Somerville, Massachusetts. She says that no job leaves enough time for writing. “Whatever you do to survive, you need to defend your time like a pit bull.” Ellis, who teaches creative writing at Case Western Reserve University and at Lesley University’s low-residency program, says that “all time is writing time,” and, therefore, a poet must steal time from sleep to write.

But the challenge is not just in finding the time, of course. Sarah Gridley, whose Weather Eye Open was published by the University of California Press, says that juggling a job and writing is “a matter of reserving mental energy, as well as time. I tend to prefer jobs where I get to do physical work, where I don’t have to bring work home at night, or stare at a computer all day.” Most recently, Gridley worked as a visiting professor at the University of Iowa.

Corinne Lee, the author of PYX (Penguin), is a freelance writer and editor who also runs Winnow Press, an independent publisher of poetry and fiction in central Texas. Lee says she takes advantage of every chance to write—spare moments at the doctor’s office, for example, or while waiting for her kids to finish gymnastics class. “I shoehorn writing into my life at every opportunity,” she says. “I think that writers, especially poets, have been unduly influenced by the ivory-tower, isolationist view that writers must have private, uninterrupted, consolidated blocks of time so that they can create. Historically, this is a fairly modern—and, I believe, crippling—concept.”

Victoria Chang (Circle, Southern Illinois University Press), who is an academic researcher for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, agrees. “My experiences outside of poetry have only broadened my poems. Nothing’s mutually exclusive with poetry.”

Mark Sullivan, the author of Slag (Texas Tech University Press), has the job that seems furthest from the writing life—at least that’s what one would assume. But Sullivan, who works nights and weekends as a legal assistant for a large corporate law firm in New York City, says his job is ideal for a writer. “It’s part-time work, and although I have regularly scheduled shifts, the hours are quite flexible and usually allow me to have four free days a week to work on poetry,” he says. “Another great aspect of the job is that the entire night staff consists of creative artists—many actors, but also writers, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers. It’s a wonderful, informal creative community.”

One of the unfortunate consequences of the controversy over the fairness of some poetry contests—apart from the possibility that the accusations against judges and administrators are accurate—is that the conversations we have about the books that win (or lose) are rarely about the poetry in those books. We talk about the circumstances under which a poet won (or lost) a particular contest, not about the quality of the writing in question. And with the spotlight shining on the dozens of debut poetry books that win contests each year, we often forget about the hundreds of others that are published outside of the contest arena.

Of the eighteen books featured here, ten were published as the result of winning contests. But, as the ten poets will tell you, the letters informing them that they had won didn’t just magically appear. A winning collection usually comes from years of hard work and revision. Not to mention a small fortune in entry fees. “I spent money that I did not have on contests,” admits Sheryl Luna, whose Pity the Drowned Horses was published by the University of Notre Dame Press after she won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, the competition for which, coincidentally, does not charge an entry fee.

Geoff Bouvier spent nine years writing the poems in his book, Living Room, and spent another six years sending the manuscript to twenty to twenty-five contests annually—over one hundred contests in all. He was named a finalist for fourteen of them, including the National Poetry Series and the Colorado Prize, before Heather McHugh selected Living Room as the winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize last year.

Duffin’s King Vulture was a finalist in several contests, including the Bakeless Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize, the National Poetry Series, the Gerald Cable Book Award, and the Winnow Press First Book Award. It was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award three times. “That could go on forever without yielding a book,” she says. “Having been a finalist is a rather useless currency, because the manuscript goes into the next contest without a history. Still, it means the work connected with somebody, somewhere.”

Laura Sims sent her manuscript to at least twenty contests before Practice, Restraint won the Alberta Prize, sponsored by Fence Books, a prize for which she had been named a finalist in a previous year. Dana Goodyear says she sent work to so many contests one year that one of the clerks at her post office “got into the mortifying habit of reciting verse whenever he saw me.” Goodyear didn’t win any of the contests she entered; instead, her book, Honey and Junk, was published by W.W. Norton.

While the majority of the poets spent years writing their books, and more years finding a publisher, a couple of them were, by their own admission, lucky. Corinne Lee wrote all but a few of the poems in PYX over a three-week period. She submitted to four contests, and, after being named a finalist for the third, a prize sponsored by Tupelo Press, she won the National Poetry Series.

But the path to publication was shortest for Catherine Wing, who, after spending four years writing the poems in Enter Invisible, received an acceptance from the first publisher she sent it to, Sarabande Books. “In the only moment of my life that has ever seemed even remotely like a fairy tale, the book was accepted the first time I sent it out,” she says. “As a result, I’m pretty sure I’m due for some karmic comeuppance: I’ll never win the lottery; I’ll never strike oil or gold; no prince masquerading as a pauper will ever fall for me.”

Of course, the story—or, in Wing’s case, the fairy tale—isn’t over once a collection is written and a publisher is found. The sometimes lengthy and complicated process whereby a manuscript is made into a book and that book is delivered to its readers can be a challenge that claims all of one’s attention. “I was taken by how difficult it was for me to focus on new work while thinking about or working through the mechanics of the book’s production and promotion,” says Andrea Baker. “I wasn’t really able to go forward with new work until the book had landed in my hands and seemed to be on its way in the world.”

Goodyear, whose book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review in May, doesn’t worry about her new writing nearly as much as about the work that is already collected in Honey and Junk. “The strangest part about it, I think, is the sense that the poems have become fixed and concrete, and that, together, they form an object in the world,” she says. “Sometimes that thought unsettles me—I fret, and see flaws—but mostly the book’s existence seems like a stroke of incredible luck.”

If a poetry book’s existence is a stroke of luck, its ability to attract a readership—and compete against the thousands of other collections published each year—is nothing short of a miracle. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen. “The biggest disappointment is simply realizing that so few people actually read and buy books of poetry,” says Victoria Chang. “It seems like more people want to publish their own work than read the work of others. My fiction friends have it a bit easier. The general public is much more interested in reading their work. Poets, on the other hand, have to work hard to let people know about their books.”

All of the poets are working with their publishers to find their readers, and whether they are organizing their own book tours, placing ads in literary magazines, or sending out copies of their books for review, the process is ongoing. Without the high-profile publicity campaigns that serve many first-time fiction writers, however, it’s unlikely that the debuts of Barter, Gridley, and Wing, for example, will attract the kind of attention that was given to Lahiri, Packer, and Foer. But ask any of the poets and they will most likely tell you that it was never their intention to be the “next new thing” in contemporary poetry anyway. They are, it seems, more forward-looking.

And so are most of the publishers. Coffee House Press publishes five or six books of poetry each year, and, according to publisher Allan Kornblum, at least two of them are first books. In an ideal world, one of these would land on the best-seller list, but Lauren Snyder, the press’s marketing assistant, says Coffee House maintains its commitment to debut poetry for a different reason. “Publishing debut poetry is essential to the legacy of poetry itself. All the currently established poets started somewhere—they didn’t emerge from the womb carrying CVs loaded with previous publications. A handful of today’s debut authors will become tomorrow’s greats, and that glittering possibility is one of the joys of publishing.”

It won’t happen next year, or even the year after that, but who knows—maybe some day one of the recently published debut poetry books will get the attention it deserves, and future generations of poets will look for it up there on the top shelf, along with the well-worn copies of Prufrock, Harmonium, The Weary Blues, and Some Trees.

Like Wind Loves a Window [3] (Slope Editions) by Andrea BakerAge: 29Residence: Brooklyn Graduate degree: NoneJob: Small business ownerRepresentative lines: “what if I loved / like wind / loves a window”Influences: Sappho, Lydia DavisBlurbs: Donald Revell, Jean Valentine, Bin RamkeTime spent writing the book: 10 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 1 yearIn the works: “I’m writing and beginning to have a sense of where I might be going, but I am not close to having any sense of a cohesive manuscript.”A bit of advice: “Read first books and know which presses are receptive to your particular aesthetic.”

The Singers I Prefer[4] (CavanKerry Press) by Christian BarterAge: 36Residence: Bar Harbor, MaineGraduate degree: MFA from Vermont CollegeJob: Trail crew supervisor at Acadia National ParkTime spent writing the book: 8 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 2 yearsRepresentative line: “It smelled like you would, and kept right on smelling that way”Influences: John Keats, Charles Bukowski, Robert Frost, Frank O’Hara, James WrightBlurbs: Sydney Lea, Baron WormserIn the works: A second book of poetryA bit of advice: “You must somehow not get distracted or carried away by the process of sending things out, and, inevitably, getting rejected a lot. Send to the reputable contests—you probably won’t win, but if you are a finalist at a few places, it helps your viability when you send to other presses. Certainly, you need to publish in magazines. Be patient. Give patience a new meaning, something more like forgetting.”

Living Room[5] (American Poetry Review) by Geoff Bouvier, winner of the 2005 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Heather McHughAge: 36Residence: San Diego Graduate degree: MFA from Bard CollegeJobs: Waiter, freelance journalistTime spent writing the book: 9 yearsNumber of contests entered: 100 to 150Representative line: “Here, between an M and N, lives my feeling’s loud illiteracy.”Influences: Franz Kafka, Wallace StevensBlurbs: John Ashbery, Lydia DavisIn the works: “‘Glass Harmonica’ is roughly 80 percent finished.”A bit of advice: “Make sure that you keep writing for yourself. In other words, remember what’s important—the work itself—and never cater to the career. But don’t give up on the career either. You have to keep trying, but if you ‘make it’ on any terms other than your own, then someday you’re going to regret it.”

Cipher/Civilian [6] (Edge Books) by Leslie BumsteadAge: 38Residence: Takoma Park, MarylandGraduate degree: MFA from George Mason UniversityJob: Full-time motherTime spent writing the book: 10 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 3 yearsRepresentative lines: “Very wondering manacled mind-eater / blues.”Influences: Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Carolyn Forché Blurbs: Laura Moriarity, Carolyn ForchéIn the works: “I’m working on a collaboration with Jean Donnelly that we feel could work as a book.”A bit of advice: “Remove the layers of not-truth from your book, whatever that may be—showing off, or losing the focus of what the language is doing in favor of what others will think of you. It’s also useful to keep in mind the purpose of publishing a book, which, for me, is very simple: to share your work with others. I see people—including me, when I forget—getting all worked up about their worth as a poet in terms of whether or not they’ve published a book. This is stupid. A poet is a person who makes poems, whether or not they get published in magazines or books. We all know this, and yet it’s easy to get caught up in the other bullshit.”

Circle [7] (Southern Illinois University Press) by Victoria Chang, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award, selected by Jon TribbleAge: 34Residence: Irvine, CaliforniaGraduate degree: MFA from Warren Wilson CollegeJob: Researcher for the Stanford Graduate School of BusinessTime spent writing the book: 10 years Number of contests entered: 30 to 45 Representative lines: “Something is thundering in my body. / You can hear it in the soil, bulbs breaking out into a cathedral.”Influences: Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen KellyBlurbs: David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Rick BarotIn the works: “It’s not a book, per se. I’m just writing poems that continue on the themes in the last section of my first book—more global themes related to war and human nature.”A bit of advice: “I’ll quote an editor I heard at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He said that talent, luck, and chug [persistence] are the three traits that can lead to success in publishing. I agree, but I would also say that humility and a desire for excellence are really important traits in a poet—not insecurity, but humility. Read a lot of poetry, and support fellow poets by buying books. Finally, try to remain positive about yourself, and be positive toward other poets. It’s so easy in this environment to think that everything related to poetry is a big conspiracy. True, some aspects of the poetry world can be sketchy, but there are still a lot of people in poetry who have integrity and believe in the integrity of the work. One can waste a lot of energy focusing on all the wrong things.”

Resin[8] (Louisiana State University Press) by Geri Doran, winner of the 2004 Walt Whitman Award, selected by Henri ColeAge: 41Residence: Pacifica, CaliforniaGraduate degree: MFA from the University of FloridaJob: Development and communications director at Djerrasi Resident Artists ProgramTime spent writing the book: “Several years.”Number of contests entered: “A handful of contests for a handful of years.” Representative line: “I want the god I pray to to be real.”Influences: W.B. Yeats, T.S. EliotBlurbs: Henri Cole, Eavan Boland In the works: “A second book is years away, I suspect. For now, I want to move forward in the poems, to find a new music or a new way with old music.”A bit of advice: “People find their own way through. Our paths are all so different.”

King Vulture[9] (University of Arkansas Press) by K.E. DuffinAge: “Older than a prodigy, younger than Stanley Kunitz.”Residence: Somerville, MassachusettsGraduate degree: NoneJobs: Part-time editor, writing tutorTime spent writing the book: 11 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 6 yearsRepresentative lines: “Your story is cracking open without any thunder, / hatching the unformed darkness in which you see / your shadow bob and dissolve as light puts its hand / on your shoulder for the last time. And you slide under.”Influences: Osip Mandelstam, Czeslaw Milosz, Hart CraneBlurbs: Alfred Corn, Henry HartIn the works: “I have another book nearly complete, and, I suppose, new poems are now headed toward a third.”A bit of advice: “Read widely and cultivate a lifelong immersion in the work of the masters—not in the academic, quiz-show sense, but as a seeker of comfort and thrill, moments of ratification and surprise that exist outside of time. Follow quirky passions, because they will lead to your own distinctive strangeness. Trust the ear. Remember what Mallarmé said to Degas: ‘Poems are made with words, not ideas.’ There are three necessities for the life of poetry in the world: an instinctive, fatalistic love of the art; near-psychotic persistence; and a willingness to alienate all others in finding your own way. Submit to presses that can accept several good books a year.”

The Maverick Room[10] (Graywolf Press) by Thomas Sayers EllisAge: 42Residence: ClevelandGraduate degree: MFA from Brown UniversityJob: TeacherTime spent writing the book: 6 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 1 yearRepresentative line: “flags are not flowers.”Influences: “I am a cross between Br’uh Signifying Rabbit Shine Stack O Drum Voices and Gwendolyn Amiri Aimé Funken(gertrude)stein De la AWS Worriation.”Blurbs: Amiri Baraka, Michael Eric Dyson, Michael S. HarperIn the works: “I don’t even want to utter a working title, but I am enjoying it and it really does feel as natural as skin.… Some titles of the poems in the manuscript are ‘As Segregation, As Us,’ ‘The Return of Colored Only,’ and ‘Ways to Be Black in a Poem.’”A bit of advice: “Forget the word book. Resist the trend of thematic series. Practice all forms of literacy—visual and emotional, too. Admit that there’s more than one of you; and surprise and embarrass all of yourselves.”

Weather Eye Open [12] (University of California Press) by Sarah GridleyAge: 37Residence: Bath, MaineGraduate degree: MFA from the University of MontanaJob: TeacherTime spent writing the book: 6 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 4 yearsRepresentative lines: “Look: scarcely red thermometers: how the slight oracles / speak of weather”Influences: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” by Robert Duncan, “The Strength of Fields” by James DickeyBlurb: Cole Swensen In the works: “I suspect that what I am writing now might later prove to be tossers—disposable exercises in service of some kind of aesthetic molting.”A bit of advice: “On a practical note: Go in fear of epigraphs. Obtaining permissions consumes time and money. On a philosophical note: In reading some of Walt Whitman’s prose accounts of his travels in the West, I came across a Shoshone oath which he had made a special point of recording: ‘The earth sees me, the sun sees me: shall I lie?’ I think the best thing you can do for yourself as a writer is to keep the endeavor that clear, that strong, that focused.”

Leadbelly[13] (Verse Press) by Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, selected by Brigit Pegeen KellyAge: 39Residence: Champaign, IllinoisGraduate degree: MFA from New York UniversityJob: TeacherTime spent writing the book: 5 yearsNumber of contests entered: 29Representative lines: “freedom lurches in and out of my life / heavy as the swollen secret of a noose.”Influences: Sterling Plumpp, Ai, Sterling Brown, Ernest J. GainesBlurbs: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius EadyIn the works: “I am only working word by word, line by line, poem by poem these days.”A bit of advice: “Revise, revise, revise. Listen to critique as humbly as you can. Keep your head down and your hopes high. Don’t give up.”

PYX[14] (Penguin) by Corinne Lee, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, selected by Pattiann RogersAge: 43Residence: Austin, TexasGraduate degree: MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ WorkshopJobs: Freelance writer and editor, publisher of Winnow PressTime spent writing the book: 3 weeksNumber of contests entered: 4 Representative lines: “a woman can stream milk / for anyone, mugger or mogul, each drop spooling / like grace, like bisque.”Influences: John Ashbery’s poem “At North Farm,” Brian Henry’s book American Incident, Hoa Nguyen’s chapbook Red JuiceBlurbs: Kathleen Peirce, Pattiann RogersIn the works: “I am writing a collection of poems called ‘Astrolabe’; it is based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s delightful treatise on the astrolabe. As the collection’s title implies, the poems in it are larger and more ‘cosmic’ in scope than those in PYX.”A bit of advice: “Concentrate more on your poems than on obtaining acknowledgments. At the press I run, Winnow Press, we see far too many manuscripts of poems that have a stellar publishing record—almost every poem has been in a prestigious magazine. However, the poems themselves are bloodless, pedestrian. It is as if those poets struggled too much to please everyone and, in doing so, ignored their unique voices.”

Pity the Drowned Horses[15] (University of Notre Dame Press) by Sheryl Luna, winner of the 2004 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, selected by Robert VasquezAge: 40Residence: DenverGraduate degrees: MFA from the University of Texas, El Paso; PhD from the University of North TexasJob: TeacherTime spent writing the book: 5 yearsNumber of contests entered: “I didn’t count, but it was a large sum.”Representative lines: “This is the way the border transfigures greed, / shapes it into something holy”Influences: Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace StevensBlurbs: Bruce Bond, Lisa Chavez, Robert VasquezIn the works: A second book of poetryA bit of advice: “I offer encouragement, and I think that the whole endeavor requires a willingness to make sacrifices and persist.”

Whethering[16] (Center for Literary Publishing) by Rusty Morrison, winner of the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Forrest GanderAge: 49Residence: Richmond, CaliforniaGraduate degree: MFA from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CaliforniaJobs: Teacher, publisher of Omnidawn PublishingTime spent writing the book: 3 yearsNumber of contests entered: “At least 8 contests each year since 2001.” Representative line: “whethering which is to say waking is only one thing”Influences: Osip Madelstam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan, Barbara GuestBlurbs: Forrest Gander, Elizabeth Robinson, Gillian ConoleyIn the works: “I am not someone who can comfortably summarize works-in- progress.”A bit of advice: “I spent quite a few years sending to all the larger contests, and always with much hope attached to the process. Of course, I felt a lot of disappointment at each rejection. And more and more I began to think about the odds, and how impossible winning had begun to seem. But at some point, along with that sense of the impossible, came a kind of giving up on worrying, or hoping. I kept using contest deadlines as revision deadlines, but I kept that as the focus. My process became what it is now: I use the deadline as a pressure point to reenter the work and to see what I want to do to make the poems most present and engaging.”

Somewhere Else [17] (Coffee House Press) by Matthew ShenodaAge: 28Residence: Berkeley, CaliforniaGraduate degree: MFA from the University of ArizonaJob: TeacherTime spent writing the book: 3 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 1.5 yearsRepresentative line: “That our eyes must be liberated”Influences: Sonia Sanchez, the poets of the Black Arts movementBlurbs: Juan Felipe Herrera, Simon Ortiz, Quincy TroupeIn the works: “I am currently finishing a new collection titled ‘Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone.’ It is a book that deals largely with ecological and cultural practices and the destruction and continuation of those practices in the Nile River Valley. The book weaves ancient Egyptian narrative with modern struggles and subject matter.”A bit of advice: “I think it is very important to remember that poetry is not a material art; poetry is oral, it is a part of song, and sometimes songs vanish. The temporality of music is an important part of this process. It is necessary, in my opinion, for poets to find the fire within, to know why they write and never compromise their work for the sake of publishing. This is not a monetary art form. Too many young poets are seduced by Hollywood notions of fame, forgetting the healing and cultural properties of poetry. We must not forget the ancestral struggles that came with being a poet, a griot, a singer, a story-speaker.”

Practice, Restraint[18] (Fence Books) by Laura Sims, winner of the 2005 Alberta Prize, selected by the editors of FenceAge: 31Residence: Madison, WisconsinGraduate degree: MFA from the University of Washington, SeattleJob: TeacherTime spent writing the book: 5 yearsNumber of contests entered: 20Representative lines: “Let this year be a year / Of presents / To the weird authentic”Influences: Rae Armantrout, Lorine NiedeckerBlurbs: Cole Swensen, C.D. Wright, Rae ArmantroutIn the works: “I’m taking a prose manuscript I’ve had for about ten years and ‘rewriting’ it as poetry. It’s an experiment at this point; we’ll see how it goes.”A bit of advice: “Keep sending it out—and not just to contests. There are many excellent small presses that accept unsolicited manuscripts, and even when the manuscript is not accepted, you may get some valuable feedback—which you usually won’t get in response to contest submissions. Also, wait to send it out until it’s truly ready. I don’t think my manuscript was truly ready until this past fall.”

Slag [19] (Texas Tech University Press) by Mark Sullivan, winner of the 2004 Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry, selected by Robert FinkAge: 44Residence: New York CityGraduate degree: MA from Columbia UniversityJob: Legal assistantTime spent writing the book: 10 yearsNumber of contests entered: 75 to 100 Representative lines: “Imagine / each movement as an arrival”Influences: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard HugoBlurbs: Louis Asekoff, Dare Clubb, Emily HiestandIn the works: “As always, I’m currently working on new poems that I hope eventually to shape into a book. Since I decided, for the sake of some stylistic and thematic unity in Slag, to stop adding new poems to the manuscript at a certain point, I now have on hand about three or four years of work that comes after the first book. I’ve put together a chapbook of some of these poems, which I plan to start sending out, and I’m hopeful that—the vagaries of inspiration and life allowing—I may have a new manuscript in another year or so.”A bit of advice: “Take seriously the accomplishments and even minor encouragements that come to you. As writers, we often dwell on the difficulties of the profession and the negative experiences—the summary rejections, the lack of money and recognition. But when you think about it, it’s completely amazing that something you produce in fleeting, private moments can at times resonate enough with others that it brings about the acceptance of editors and, eventually, the attention of readers, however many or few. There’s no need to undervalue ourselves or be overly humble, but we also shouldn’t forget how unlikely and moving—no other word for it—this all is. Engage in the literary world in some way that isn’t about your own career, whether it’s buying poetry books, subscribing to journals, teaching, or volunteering at a journal.”

Enter Invisible[20] (Sarabande Books) by Catherine WingAge: 33Residence: SeattleGraduate degree: MFA from the University of WashingtonJobs: Teacher, waitressTime spent writing the book: 4 yearsTime spent finding a publisher: 3 monthsRepresentative lines: “A garden overthrown / with glitz and grammar.”Influences: Rick Kenney, Cody Walker, John Ashbery, W.H. Auden Blurb: Dean YoungIn the works: “I’m writing some new poems that I hope will eventually add up to a second book, but for now I’m taking it one poem at a time.”A bit of advice: “If you want to be a writer of any kind, you have to make the choices in life that will allow you the time to write. In a recent New York Times article about Chris Jordan, the former-corporate-lawyer-now-photographer, Philip Gefter wrote: ‘When [Jordan] finally left his job, he went to the trouble of resigning from the bar, intentionally dismantling the safety net that his legal experience would provide should photography not be an adequate livelihood.’ With all my legal waivers signed in triplicate, and my malpractice insurance up to date, my advice is to dismantle the safety net. If you want to write, make the choices that will allow you to do so.”